The Optimist's Good Morning — Story, Setting & Ideas

A Calendar of Contrasts

The volume's structure is a calendar running from July 1 through June 30, each day offering a quotation and an original prayer. The excerpts reveal a deliberate pairing of voices: a prose passage from a known author (John Ruskin, Henry Ward Beecher, Confucius) is followed by a prayer composed by a named minister or layperson (Isaac P. Coddington, George H. Cheney, Louis H. Buckshorn). This creates a dialogue between public wisdom and private petition. The quotations themselves vary in tone—Ruskin's gentle assurance that 'we cannot be pleasing Him if we are not happy ourselves' sits beside Confucius's gnomic 'Buried deep, truth ever lies.' The prayers often echo or rephrase the quotation's themes, as when Cheney's prayer picks up Beecher's leaf-and-cradle metaphor. The effect is less a seamless meditation than a deliberate juxtaposition, inviting the reader to move from reflection to direct address.

The Voice of the Prayers

The prayers, though written by different hands, share a consistent register: formal, reverent, and slightly archaic. They address God as 'Father Divine,' 'Eternal Father,' 'Our Heavenly Father,' and employ a syntax of petition ('Help us,' 'May we,' 'We pray Thee'). Yet within this uniformity, small variations emerge. Some prayers are terse and focused on daily work—'our business the Father's business'—while others expand into cosmic reassurance: 'Thou who dost care for the birds and the lilies art ever mindful of us.' A few, like the prayer for July 7, adopt a more intimate tone, asking for 'our better heart, our better hands.' The prayers rarely quote scripture directly, but they are saturated with biblical cadence and imagery. They function as a kind of devotional gloss on the preceding quotation, translating its sentiment into a request for grace.

The Optimist's Premise

The title's 'optimist' is not a Pollyanna but a person who deliberately cultivates hope as a discipline. The preface frames optimism as a counterweight to modern anxiety: 'the more rapid pace involved in these modern pace-makers, renders the more necessary some pause.' The selections themselves reinforce this. Henry Ward Beecher's July 8 entry chides 'O Impatient Ones!' and insists that God is 'carrying forward to the perfect development all the processes of our lives.' A July 9 entry (attributed to an unnamed source) declares, 'Let us hope that one day all mankind will be happy and wise; and though this day never should dawn to have hoped for it cannot be wrong.' The optimism here is not naive but willed—a choice to trust in a benevolent plan despite evidence of hurry and worry. The prayers consistently echo this, asking for patience, trust, and deliverance from worry.

Readers approaching The Optimist's Good Morning should note its dual nature: it is both a curated anthology and a script for a daily practice. The quotations reward slow reading, while the prayers offer a model for personal devotion. The book's brevity—each day's entry occupies less than a page—belies its ambition to reshape the reader's morning. It is best used as Perin intended: with a few minutes of silence, a willingness to let the words sink, and perhaps a pencil to mark passages that resonate.

The rain streaked the window as I turned from Perin’s gentle morning prayers, her plea for unhurried calm. Somehow, the little 1911 calendar’s talk of “modern haste” wore thin until I was chasing the very publishers behind its gilt edges: a fine, forgotten bookish trail. That led me to a Selected List of Nimmo, Hay, & Mitchell's Publications [1890] — Text and Context, a quiet catalogue, and a far longer afternoon vanished inside its dusty promises.